Research is proposed to examine the relationship between drinking and "conditioned anxieties" such as cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) and guilt, that are aroused by behaviors and events which contradict an individual's internalized values and self-concepts. The approach taken in this research is social psychological in the sense that it examines a set of social situational and interpersonal antecedents that by producing a particular type of negative affect, may foster drinking. It is specifically proposed that tensions such as dissonance and guilt may increase self-regulated drinking because of its actual and reputed ability to induce positive affect, and that by reducing these tensions, drinking may eliminate subsequent efforts to rectify their causes. Two experiments bearing on the relationship between drinking and congnitive dissonance, which provided preliminary support for this reasoning, are described. Four investigations are proposed to examine the following issues: 1) the replicability of the preliminary findings and their generalizability across different drinking habits, 2) whether the observed effects are mediated physiologically through the pharmacological effects of alcohol, or cognitively, through expectations, 3) whether the predicted effects generalize to the relationship between drinking and guilt, 4) whether personality traits of the subjects in these experiments can be identifed which may predispose alcohol abuse in situations laden with conditioned anxiety. Results from this research should help to 1) gain a clearer understanding of the relationship between drinking and negative affect, 2) broaden social psychological theories of consistency processes to incorporate the possibility of self-induced positive affect as response to psychological inconsistency, 3) provide initial data relevant to identifying a subpopulation of alcohol abusers and potential abusers who are especially susceptible to drinking in response to conditioned anxieties.